Comment by atomicnumber3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atomicnumber3 | Hacker News Reader

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I normally interview in Java, partly because I know it's deepest demons, and partly because pretty much anywhere will let you interview in it.

But recently I interviewed for a staff engineer position and there was a portion that was "API programming." Just writing a basic REST API to CRUD a model object. And I was like, oh my god, I know what I have to do. So I used rails. It was an hour and 15 minute block, and I ran the interviewer out of extensions to the problem after 30-40 mins. So we just chatted for 20 more and then both went to an early dinner.

(Unfortunately I didn't get the job - they were hiring a staff engineer but afaict ended up downgrading the seat to a senior engineer spot (50% the total comp) and rejected me and the other guy who was interviewing for the staff spot.)

But damn did I feel like I properly represented Ruby and rails in that one interview.

Maybe that was the problem, Rails and Ruby for this problem didn’t demonstrate enough challenge for the role, so it didn’t show you off enough in the interview.

I actually had a similar thing happen to me, blazed thru a similar "design an API" type question flawlessly, but they didn't like that I didn't write up a lot of custom code for standard CRUD stuff...

It's like they wanted me to overcomplicate things for some reason

Eh maybe. But if they want someone who can wank off instead of ship things, then I don't know that I want to work there. And I'll never know since places don't give you feedback despite the time and interest you showed.

That could be framed as an interviewer skill issue. We're supposed to give the candidate space to demonstrate both their productivity and their talent. So if expecting a programmer to reveal their abstract thinking capacity through some complex domain-specific task, building a REST API for CRUD may not be the ideal vehicle, being so mundane as to lend itself unquestionably to off-the-shelf framework solutions almost any mature language.

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